War Paint, the Broadway Musical About Dueling Beauty Queens, Heads to the Great White Way

War Paint co-stars Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole, photographed at the Goodman Theatre, in Chicago.

Photograph by Joe Pugliese. Costumes designed by Catherine Zuber. Makeup designed by Angelina Avallone. Hair designed by David Brian Brown.

In a rare moment of generosity, cosmetics pioneer Helena Rubinstein said
of her arch-nemesis, Elizabeth Arden, “With her products and my
packaging we could have ruled the world.” In fact, the two self-made
colossi—one a Polish-Jewish immigrant with a rapacious appetite for
art, jewelry, and real estate, and the other a dirt-poor Canadian farm
girl with an insatiable hunger for racehorses and Wasp society—never
met. But the inescapable fact of the other one’s existence goaded each
of them on to greater and greedier glory. “The only Elizabeth stronger
than I,” Arden proclaimed, “is the Queen.” Over the course of their
epic careers, the rivals legitimated the use of cosmetics for
respectable women, along the way perfecting such vanity-table staples as
the lipstick tube and the mascara wand.

Now the Tony-winning team from Grey Gardens—director Michael Greif,
librettist Doug Wright, composer Scott Frankel, lyricist Michael
Korie—have resurrected the feuding makeup mavens for the musical War
Paint, opening next month at the Nederlander Theatre and co-starring
Broadway legends Patti LuPone, as Rubinstein, and Christine Ebersole, as
Arden. “They had never worked together before,” Wright says. “None of
us knew how the chemistry would react. But their affection keeps growing
as their dastardly deeds onstage multiply.” LuPone notes, “There is
not a person out there today who can compare to either of these women in
their extravagance, their power, their business acumen, their excess.”
One song, Ebersole says, raises the pertinent question of whether the
duo “made women freer or helped enslave them.” But, for Rubinstein,
such speculation was probably moot. “There are no ugly women,” she
decreed. “Only lazy ones.”